Audit, Compliance and Risk Blog

On March 4, 2019, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (Commission) issued its first affirmation of a citation and penalty issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to punish a health care provider under the Employer’s General Duty Clause for failing to take adequate steps to prevent workplace violence. OSHA has issued citations under this Clause since 2012, but this is the first time that the Commission has confirmed one of these citations on appeal.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is continuing its renewed reviews of asbestos products, and has just issued a requirement that “discontinued” uses receive new review and approval before they can re-enter commerce in the United States. Formally, EPA has issued a Significant New Use Rule (SNUR) covering these products (I wrote about the SNUR proposal here).

The Trump Administration has taken another step to centralize its control over federal agencies’ rulemakings and policy-setting. Rulemaking has always reflected tensions between the politicians who adopt laws, and the agency staff who interpret and apply them through formal rules and information guidance and procedures. Depending how entrenched career staff are in their agencies, there may also be tensions between the elected executive (President, governor, etc.) and his or her agencies, even after his or her appointees are nominally in charge.

Millions of people live and work in flood-prone areas, and rely on federal insurance to facilitate their activities. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administers the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), under which FEMA defines which flood-prone areas qualify for insurance. In March, FEMA announced plans to change its definitions and underwriting; meanwhile legislation has been introduced in Congress to change NFIP. Depending how these changes turn out, thousands of locations will gain or lose eligibility, and the costs of NFIP insurance could change considerably. As climate change exacerbates the likelihood and severity of floods, the importance of these changing provisions grows – for participants and for the general tax-paying public who often end up subsidizing them.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has just proposed to assign chemical review priorities for 40 chemicals, as required by the 2016 Amendments to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA; the “Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act”). As required by the 2016 Amendments, the proposal identifies 20 high priority chemicals for evaluation within three years, and 20 low priority chemicals that do not require further evaluation. Once each evaluation is completed, EPA is to determine appropriate regulatory requirements. Organizations that manufacture, process or use any of these chemicals should follow the rulemaking and evaluation process(es), and consider possible substitutes in order to reduce hazards and possible regulatory changes after completion of each relevant evaluation.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has completed a long review, and reaffirmed the primary National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for oxides of sulfur (SOX; usually measured as sulfur dioxide (SO₂)). This is the first review of the primary SOX NAAQs since 2010 (primary standard – EPA did not review the secondary SOX NAAQS established in 2012).

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has just made massive updates to the largest national data base of chemical information, the TSCA Inventory. Since 1976, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) has provided EPA with broad authorities to collect information about chemical substances in commerce in the U.S., including new chemicals that manufacturers and importers hope to bring into commerce. Information about all these substances is collected in the TSCA Inventory.

On March 11, the Trump Administration issued its budget proposal for federal Fiscal Year (FY) 2020 (October 1, 2019 through September 30, 2020), entitled “A Budget for a Better America: Promises Kept. Taxpayers First.” The proposal includes a 31% cut in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) budget, from $8.28 billion in FY 2019 (under a Continuing Budget Resolutions rather than a fully-new federal budget), to $6.07 billion for FY 2020, with corresponding personnel cuts from 14,376 full-time-equivalent employees (FTE) to 12,415. (these are numbers for EPA in the government-wide budget from the Office of Management and Budget (OMBB) summary of the entire budget proposal, and EPA provides additional details on its own website).

After a long rulemaking, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has just promulgated rules defining certain waste pharmaceuticals as “hazardous wastes” under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), and establishing standards for their management by selected healthcare and “reverse distribution” waste management facilities. These regulations replace general RCRA generator and treatment requirements otherwise applicable to hazardous wastes.

On December 11, 2018 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) jointly proposed to revise their regulatory definitions of “waters of the United States”, applying authority under the Clean Water Act (CWA). CWA does not define this term clearly, so after decades of rulemakings and litigation, it remains in dispute. Generally, Democratic presidents and the judges they appoint tend to support geographically and semantically broad applications, while with Republican presidents and the judges they appoint tend to take narrower views. The latest proposal would narrow the definition, reversing Obama-era rules adopted in June 2015, and presently in effect in 22 states based on the present status of ongoing judicial appeals (I summarized the 2015 rules, and the litigation leading up to them here and the Trump-era EPA’s 2017 proposal to roll back the 2015 revisions here). The agencies characterize this narrowing as an increase in certainty for stakeholders, accomplished by eliminating some of the site-specific discretion that the 2015 rules provided to permit writers. Because of the government shutdown, this latest proposal was not published in the Federal Register until February 14, 2019.